On Saturday morning, John got up very early in a very joyful mode. He put on his sport suit to get ready for a morning jogging while humming a song that he had not sung for very long. When he opened his door and stepped out his house he heard the melody of the same song he was humming from a car parked not far from his house. “What a coincidence!” he talked to himself. Just being curious he stepped back into his house and closed the door. Then he could no longer hear the song from that car. He laughed to himself and went out again to start his jogging.

On his way running to the park, he passed by two kids who were walking and talking. John heard one of the kids spoke to the other, “I knew it would happen because I have the sixth sense.” John looked at those two kids and laughed. He repeated to himself those two words “sixth sense”. All of a sudden a brilliant idea popped up in his mind, “what happened before I stepped out of my house could be caused by my own sixth sense.”

He felt so excited about his new idea and decided to go home to test it out. He took a short cut and ran fast to get back home.

After he got home, John turned on his old DVD player, put in one DVD, and then adjusted the volume just below what he could barely hear the sound. Then he took out that DVD put in another one by making sure that he did know what is on that DVD. He left the DVD player playing and laid himself down on the sofa and pick up a magazine to read. Even though he could not hear any sound from the DVD player, he could feel himself in a cheerful mode. Whenever he felt like to hum a song he would turn up the volume of the DVD player to see if what he tried to hum was the same song played in the machine, and then he would change another DVD to play to make sure that he would not know what would be played next. For a couple of times the song he hummed was the song played in the machines. “This cannot be a pure coincidence,” he told himself.

He kept doing this for the whole morning until he felt hungry. The phone ringed when John just turned off the DVD player and ready to go out. He picked up the phone.

“Hi John” It was Jessica over the phone.

“Hi Jess. What’s up?”

“I am so glad that what you told us last night actually worked. I have been trying to discipline myself not following the tunes in my head since I left your house and my head is now very clean without any tunes.” Jessica said in a happy tone.

“Congrats, but I got some tunes in my head now.”

“Wow, then congrats to you too.” Jessica laughed.

“You should, because I just had another new enlightenment of human mind.”

“What is it?”

“The sixth sense.”

“John, I guess you are about to write sci-fi stories now.”

“It is not sci-fi but reality.”

John told Jessica his own experimental endeavor for the whole morning.

“John, it sounds interesting. But I like the theory you told us yesterday more. What you just told me now sounds a bit shaky to me because your experiment was not very solid.”

“I won’t say the experiment I did this morning was in strict scientific way either. It was some kind faith building verification for myself. However, what is more important is my metaphysical enlightenment or you may call it as the philosophical insight of what is behind.”

“Then please tell me your metaphysical enlightenment on this sixth sense thing.” Jessica asked in a suspicious tone.

“Do you still remember the iceberg analogy I mentioned yesterday?”

“Sure.”

“Our conscious mind has little knowledge about what the gigantic unconscious mind is doing when all kinds of ideas and feelings are produced within that unconscious world. That unconscious mind is like a computer and it needs raw information for it to produce end products.”

“Yeah.”

“Where does that unconscious mind get its raw information for its production?” asked John.

“From body senses.”

“Yes. Body sensory faculties are important collectors of original information for the unconscious mind to work on. Besides, internal feelings such as stomach pain and previous product of mental activities like memory, happy mode and so on are all the input data for the unconscious mind to work on.”

“That makes sense.”

“All the feelings that we are aware of are first checked by the unconscious mind and then come to our conscious mind to become our awareness. “

“That is a reasonable assumption based on the general way how mind operates,” commented Jessica.

“The tricky part for the sixth sense is the difference between what our conscious mind could be aware of and the information that unconscious mind could receive either from body sensory faculties or from previous mental activities.“ John paused for a very short period and then continued, “In the case of my experience of sound this morning, my sound collection faculty actually could sense the song from that car even before I stepped out of my house, but my conscious mind was not aware of it. My unconscious mind processed the sound information collected by my sound faculty without my awareness anyway.”

“That’s possible,” said Jessica.

“The influence of unconscious mind upon conscious mind is very complicated. As you have noticed, when you were humming a song you normally did not choose the song. It just came up to your head and you just follow the tune. We don’t know based on what the unconscious mind choose the song that would come up to your head. The sixth sense I am talking about here could be one of the reasons for the unconscious mind to choose a specific song.”

“That sounds reasonable,” commented Jessica.

“This tells us that even though we normally think we know the reasons why we would have certain thoughts in our mind or certain feelings in our heart, in general we indeed don’t. Our unconscious mind could trigger our conscious mind to be aware of some thoughts or feelings directly without letting it to be aware of what causes those thoughts or feelings. It is like you know the answer of a complicated mathematical equation but you don’t know how you get it.”

Silence from Jessica while she was digesting what John just said.

John paused for a short moment to let Jessica to follow and then continued, “This morning the first time when I found that I was humming the same song as what was played in that car, I thought it was just a coincidence. But very soon I realized that it might be because that my sensory faculty sensed the very weak sound signal penetrated into my house even before I opened the door. My unconscious mind worked on that signal and then triggered my singing faculty to start the humming in the way similar to when we normally sing songs following what we hear from the DVD players.”

“But you did not really HEAR that song this morning before you opened your door, right?” Jessica put an emphasized tone at the word “hear” when she asked the question.

“No, I did not HEAR it in the sense that my conscious mind was not aware of it because that signal was too weak to surpass the threshold for my conscious knowledge. But it does not necessarily mean that my sensory faculty did not receive the sound signal at all, and it does not mean that my unconscious mind did not work on the signal either.”

“But that is just an assumption, right?” Jessica was still not very comfortable with John’s new insight.

“You may call it as an assumption, but this assumption is not less valid as the assumption that my sensory faculty did not receive that signal at all. Both assumptions are at least equally valid. It could be just a pure coincidence that I had an internal urge to hum the same song as what was quite loudly played in a car outside my house, or there could be a cause and effect relation between these two events and my unconscious mind was doing the connection work between them. “

“But you tend to believe the second scenario because you have been onto the issue of how mind works very much in the past week, right?” Jessica pointed out the subtlety.

“You are correct on that. I realized this subjective bias in my judgment too. That’s why I came back home to do the experiment, but the outcome upheld my confidence in the assumption that my unconscious mind might have caused me to hum that song.”

“It still might be a pure coincidence, right?” asked Jessica.

“Sure. But it also still might be not a pure coincidence. As an isolate event we might not be able to make much conclusion out of it. But because of the possible cause and effect relationship here, this incidence could help to add confidence for people to pay attention to the influence of unconscious mind when similar phenomena are captured again in the future.”

“Did anyone notice this kind of influence before?” asked Jessica.

“Of course did. I believe you have heard of the term SUBLIMINAL before, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I know subliminal. You think they are related?” asked Jessica.

“Don’t you think so?”

“Hmm, I think you could be right on this. As I recall that the so called subliminal stimuli are any sensory stimuli below an individual’s absolute threshold for conscious perception, which would still affect the psychological status of the subject anyhow. I think subliminal messaging techniques have been employed in commercial and political advertisement for decades,” replied Jessica.

“You are right.”

“But why do you want to call them as sixth sense instead of subliminal?” Jessica asked.

“As you just mentioned, the term Subliminal already bears a very specific meaning for those stimuli posed on the subjects by someone else intentionally, while sixth sense just referring to the reflection to the environmental stimuli like other five senses.”

“I thought people also use the term sixth sense to refer to some supernatural connectivity,” Jessica pointed out a fact.

“That was because people did not realize that many previously unexplained feelings about the future could be attributed to the work of unconscious mind. Since we are aware of this relationship now, it is better for us to give this term a clearly defined meaning. I am not trying to deny the existence of supernatural connectivity here, but we should refer that to a higher order of sense, something like seventh sense or even higher.”

“That sounds good.” Jessica agreed.

“As a matter of fact, what I call as sixth sense not only include those directly caused by a single stimulus under the consciousness threshold, but also those from the output of unconscious mind by working on complicated multitude of messages.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked Jessica.

“For example, sometimes many people could sense that something might happen in the near future but they don’t have any proof to support such feelings.”

“That happened to me all the time and quite often it did happen as I sensed earlier. I thought they might be some kind of supernatural messages about the future and I called that as the sixth sense” Jessica said.

“I am not very sure about the supernatural part yet so that I cannot say yes or no about it, but based on what we know now about unconscious mind, at least a proportion of your senses about the future could be caused by the unconscious mind which processed some complicated information including past memories automatically without your conscious perception.”

“I think what you said is possibly true.” Jessica agreed.

“When this kind of situation happens, even though the subjective feeling about the future is not a simple reaction to a single stimulus as people normally referred to Subliminal, it is still the work of unconscious mind, and the output directly triggers some conscious feeling without a clear awareness of the cause. That’s why I also call this as sixth sense.”

“John, I have to say…” Jessica was trying to say something but stop in the middle.

John sensed the hesitation of Jessica and encouraged her to speak out whatever in her mind, “Jess, I know what I am telling you is not something you might hear every day. So, please just tell me what you really think and no need to worry if you have any doubt about what I am saying.”

“I understand all you just said but it would be more convincing if there could be hard scientific evidence,” said Jessica.

“Your concern is fully understood. What we need to be very careful here is not to get confused by the term scientific since nowadays there are a lot illusionary misunderstandings about the term scientific in the main stream culture. It has indeed become a symbol of a new religion.” John said, “In the mind of most people today, scientific does not only mean the ultimate correctness but also mean sufficient instructiveness or clearness.”

“What do you mean by that?” asked Jessica.

“What I am saying is that it is now widely held among people that if and only if something that has been or at least can be scientifically proven correct could be accepted as correct.” John replied.

“That sounds correct to me,” Jessica said with confusion.

“If this world does strictly follow this theory then the whole civilization would crash tomorrow,” said John.

“How could that be?” asked Jessica.

John did not answer but asked Jessica a question instead, “what do you think is the meaning of the term scientific?”

“I think scientific is whatever scientists would do according to the knowledge of science,” replied Jessica.

“That’s a bit vague. Actually we might find out the real meaning of the term scientific that is used among scientific professionals by comparing various cases that people called as scientific to the cases that people called as non-scientific or pseudo-scientific, .” John paused a second and then continued to explain, “A scientific outcome is an outcome that is predictable and repeatable under controllable conditions. Correspondently, a scientific approach is an approach that could create the scientific outcome.”

“You just reminded me of something I read from a book not very long ago.” Jessica said, “It was said in the book that science is about doing something repeatable in a controlled environment following the prescribed protocol.”

“Yes, it is.” John confirmed what Jessica said.

Then Jessica said, “I am a bit confused here. Isn’t it necessary for any theory that could be of practical use to be repeatable?”

“Of course it is.” John replied, “But the scientific repeatability is different from the repeatability of all other theories in general.”

“Any practically viable theory has its own domain of applicability. Outside that domain it would generally not work but within that domain it could normally work fine repeatedly.” John explained, “Most importantly, the process of developing a theory in general does not involve the test of repeatability in controlled environment following the publically available prescribed protocol by peers as required by scientific repeatability.”

“Are you saying that even though the strict scientific repeatability is good to build up the creditability, theories that were not developed following the strict scientific approach could also have repeatability?” Jessica asked to make sure that she understood correctly what John said.

“Yes, of course.” John replied, “Even long before the dawn of modern science, western people have learned various techniques of fighting, hunting, cooking, painting, singing, and so on; oriental people even developed some very sophisticated folk medical system, complicated martial arts, and so on. None of these were developed under the approach which could be qualified as strict scientific according to today’s standard of science.”

John continued to say, “In fact, even though science has long become a must to this world, the main foundation of human civilization is not scientifically provable, which includes love, imagination, sense of beauty, sense of humor, common sense of tastes, and so on, and so on.”

It was quiet on the other end of the phone and Jessica was enjoying John’s talk.

“For thousands of years before the birth of modern science, human beings were building up the mansion of human civilization based on a common sense that we human beings as one same creature would share the same senses and tastes of everything.” John said, “According to today’s scientific standard we might say that’s not correct since psychologists told us that not everyone the same. Well, the foundation of our scientific world itself has also been constructed by applying this traditionally not so scientific common sense, and our civilization still very much operates on top of this foundation.”

“I think you are right on this.”Jessica said, “In fact you just remind me of one article I read a couple of days ago. It is reported in the article that scientists now found in their experiments that being angry could cause stomach pain.”

John laughed when he heard what Jessica said.

Jessica laughed as well and said, “This should be a common knowledge for centuries and now scientists are telling us about this as a new scientific discovery. If we have all waited to learn this from scientists then I bet throughout the history there could have been much more people suffering from uncontrolled anger.”

“You are right.”John then asked, “Do you now feel more comfortable about the sixth sense connection I told you?”

“Yes for sure. I should say that this is another great enlightenment you have got during the past few days. Congratulations.”Jessica expressed that she was convinced by John.

“Thanks. One more thing about this sixth sense that I need to point out is that not everyone bears the same sensitivity to the sixth sense.” John added.

“I believe so since the sixth sense is related to something that is below the threshold for conscious perception,” said Jessica.

“Yes. By the way, do you have time for a dinner tonight?” John made a proposal for dinner together.

“Sure.”